It’s no surprise that digital advertising experienced another year of growth in 2014. According to the State of the Media Report recently published by the Pew Research Center, digital ad spend grew to $50.7 billion last year. This is an 18% increase, up from $43.1 billion in 2013. An increasing number of businesses are choosing to spend their ad dollars online instead of traditional media outlets.
Mobile Ad Revenue Growth Outpaces Digital
Digital advertising has experienced steady growth over the previous years, but mobile advertising has truly exploded. $19 billion was spent on mobile advertising last year, up 78% from 2013. Mobile continues to grow at a pace greater than digital advertising as a whole.
This highlights the shift of ad dollars not only moving to digital, but specifically to mobile digital ads. This is a result of the drastic increase in time spent on smartphones versus other devices. In fact, a comScore report on mobile usage found that smartphones and tablets account for 60% of digital media consumption. With so much time being spent on smartphones, this provides advertisers with an excellent channel to reach consumers.
What This Means for Marketers
Mobile advertising presents some outstanding opportunities for marketers. Consumers are seeing more ads on their smartphones than anywhere else, making them a prime target. However, advertisers still need to incite action from the consumer of their advertisements. Marketers have found that the best way to do this is by providing a phone number for consumers to call. Due to the fact that they are already on a phone, calling a business is the natural conversion channel. Having a phone number on your mobile ad is so effective that Google reported ads with phone numbers see a 6-8% higher click-through rate than ads without numbers. In order to optimize this channel, an increasing number of marketers are adopting call tracking software. Call tracking provides marketers the ability to track phone leads back to their source, giving them insight into which advertisements are generating calls and revenue.
Interested in learning more about smartphones impact on mobile advertising? Check out our on-demand webinar: Optimizing Search, Social and Display in a Mobile World.
